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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Blue Post & Beta Patch Bonanza

Attack of the GAMES!

So as I said, I've been quite behind in writing and I do apologize. All my downtime has been either in the beta, sleeping, or just in general turning my brain completely off to facilitate brain dumping work drama and frustration. We have had a beta patch since I started in it last Monday and we have another one on the way. The first patch brought about a few changes so let's check those out first.The first patch for the Beta, Build 15544 brought just a few changes to the monks. Cost changes and cooldown changes for the most part. Here's a look from MMO-Champion:

Blackout Kick
now costs 1 Chi, down from 2 Chi. No longer refunds Chi if the target
is killed. Can now be used regardless of the target's health, but the
target suffers an additional 1328 damage over 8 sec if it's below 50%
health.

Note: What it doesn't list is the creation of a new Chi Sphere when using this on an opponent. It seems over-triggered right now on the beta as you can end up with more Chi Spheres than you had before you used any Blackout Kicks

Death Cocoon
Encases the target in a harmful cocoon of Chi energy, dealing 5 damage
every 1 sec and causing any healing recieved to be damage instead.While
in the Cocoon, the target moves at -50% reduced speed and is unable to
attack or cast spells. 40 yd range, 2 Chi, 2 min cooldown, Instant

Note: I think this is the other portion of Chi Cocoon. Chi Cocoon as originally described is supposed to work on allies and enemies alike though so far on the beta it's only useable on allies. This would be the enemy version of it.

The upcoming beta patch posted over at MMO-C, Build 15589 (which I believe is going in right now) , has a LOT more changes to monks than the first iteration:

Dampen Harm
New: You dampen the damage from the most harmful attacks done to you.
The next 3 attacks that deal damage equal to 10% or more of your total
health are reduced in half. 1 Chi, Instant cast, 30 sec cooldown.

Healing Elixers New: Anytime you drink from a Brew or Tea, you gain 10% of your total health. This effect cannot occur once every 15 sec.

Momentum - Every time you Roll or Chi Torpedo, your movement speed is increased by 25% (was 30%) for 10 sec. Stacks up to 2 times.

Monk - Brewmaster

Breath of Fire - Now does 1,400 to 1,786 damage, down from 2,001 to 2,552.

Demateralize
New: When you are stunned, you phase out of existence temporary causing
all melee attacks and spells to miss you for until cancelled. This
effect has a 10 sec cooldown. Requires Serpent Stance

Summon White Tiger Statue
- No longer has Tiger's Lust (On-Click Effect) - Increases the damage
done by the ally and the Monk by 15% for 6 sec. Limit 2 charges per
statue.

As you can see a lot just happened that I'm thrilled to get started trying out. Right now I have a premade Windwalker and I'm leveling a Mistweaver (just got Chi Wave, yay!). Hopefully in one of these builds soon there will be monk trainers to switch specs. That and the ability to get out of Pandaria without taking a mage portal to Tol Barad and then the portal to Stormwind. I also want to cover several blue posts of importance to us.

Monk Animations for all Races

All monks will have special animations. The animators started with the
pandaren, since they had so many pandaren animations to create in the
first place, but we are slowly getting them added to the existing races.
More animations should show up each beta build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Brewmaster feedback
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Monks are a new class, and we will be
iterating on them quite a bit and often we change mechanics a lot
faster than we make beta builds. With that in mind, we wanted to clarify
our design intent on some of the abilities:

Dizzying Haze -- We increased the threat and lowered the energy. We're
not crazy about making it do damage because then it risks competing with
other Brewmaster abilities. We really don't want Dizzying Haze used
rotationaly on single-targets. We also run into whether or not the
ability should break CC if it does damage.

AE tanking -- We agree that monks need a little more ability to cleave.

Missing Jabs -- It isn't intended to lose all Energy on a miss. We will fix that.

Our intent for Brewmasters is to use Guard, Purifying
Brew and Shuffle as reactive and proactive abilities that you want to
use to react or prevent damage spikes. We're not there yet with the
cooldowns, durations and costs, which are the kinds of numbers we tune
constantly after tests and playtests. Mechanically we think the pieces
of the puzzle are there, but they don't fit together quite right yet.

We
agree that Chi generation is too slow for Brewmasters. Expel Harm is
one possible Chi generator. Also keep in mind that there is currently a
miss penalty on Energy and Chi that we plan on removing.

We also agree that the Brewmaster procs still need a bit more spice.

Free Tiger Palm is probably too strong.

In
our current builds, Brewmasters have a big health bonus, currently
higher than any other tank. We're actively iterating on tanking numbers
for all specs, but we need to consider a lot of different situations
(single boss, groups, healers spamming, damage over long periods,
different gear levels, etc.)(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mistweaver Feedback

Mana regeneration and healing throughput is something that is still being tuned, so that will feel a bit off for a while longer.

We
had to tone down Mistweaver DPS. In our raid tests, they were
contributing too much damage while still being effective healers.

Chi
Wave is something we're still tuning. The cooldown is now around 8
seconds, which may be too short. At the moment it accounts for half of
the healing in raid situations.

Jab and other DPS
abilities scale with your weapon, and also with AP. The damage is
normalized in such a way that any weapon choice is equal to the other,
so weapons are an aesthetic choice. We'll probably have the DPS
abilities scale with SP, as long as they're balanced.

We've changed Mistweavers to also have a 1 second GCD as with the other two specializations.

Can
you explain more about the problem with a longer Soothing Mists? The
mana per second is the same whether it's a short or long channel. Do you
feel compelled to complete the channel? Clipping it should not incur a
mana penalty.

Cherry Mana Tea is intended to be
"sipped" during break periods. Good Mistweavers will end a fight with as
low mana as possible and as low Cherry Mana Tea stacks as possible.
There are periods where you can't afford any breaks, but those vary by
encounter. It should no longer break on taking damage. Stacks is
something we are still iterating upon.

We've changed
Jasmine Tea to an upfront mana cost that will generate Chi over time
(think "Chi Tap"). We're still iterating a lot on this design though.
The intent is that the Mistweaver has an edge on precision healing,
while the Windwalker has less control but can gain Chi quickly.

Expel
Harm only does damage if you "effectively" healed. If it's all
overheal, no damage will happen. We intend for all monks to use the
ability. Windwalkers can heal themselves.

Scaling Issues

All Monk attacks scale with weapon damage and AP, but tooltips won't
list the weapon damage % or AP coefficient. Tooltips will just list the
expected damage value. Behind the scenes, we account for your weapon DPS
to determine the damage that your attacks will do, making it so that
you can choose whatever weapon type you want (Dual Wield or 2-Hand, for
example).

That said, a number of attacks right now don't have
proper scaling or damage values as the design of the abilities are still
in flux.